LIGHTBULB JAZELIA JASMENE
You Are What You Eat Having watched Jamie’s School Dinners, Jazelia Jasmene reconsiders the Malaysian public school canteen IMAGE: CAMILLE CHENCHEI / FLICKR
Growing up, the people I knew who paid attention to television content would have come across a distinctly talented chef. He was blonde, super cute, British, and he never bothered to wash his hands between cutting ingredients, tasting his own cooking, and touching everything else in between. If you had not noticed that, you were paying too much attention to Jamie Oliver’s accent and his oddly wide tongue. A while ago, I wrote an analysis for my Television Studies class on Jamie's School Dinners, a four-episode documentary series featuring Jamie’s attempts to improve the quality and nutritional value of school dinners at a typical British school. Surprisingly, according to the newspaper The Telegraph, it made quite an impact. Its study conducted among 11-year old pupils showed that Jamie managed to decrease the rate of absenteeism (caused by illhealth) by 15 per cent, whilst also improving their performance in English and science. It got me thinking about my own Malaysian canteen experience. During my high school years, my father was always sceptical about canteen food. But why wouldn’t he? Could the not-so-sanitary environment of school canteens have triggered his subtle Obsessive Compulsive Disorder traits? Then again, I always distinctly imagine him wiping any surface he was prone to touch. I did not quite understand him until he transferred me to a private school – where the food was more expensive, the canteens were a lot more hygienic, and lunch expenses were already in the annual tuition fees. I realised that my schoolmates in private school were much more aware of 30 | CQ MAGAZINE | #6
what they consumed and many, especially the more senior students, stayed clear of food that was either too oily or too processed. When I asked this of a friend who is currently studying culinary arts and had experienced working in hotels, he suggested that there was a possibility that the upper middle class (and the classes above) were more likely to invest in the best food for their children. In contrast, the lower part of the strata (presumably to be the majority in public schools) practiced the mindset of “asalkan kenyang”, consuming food only for survival. This might have also influenced the contents of daily proportions mainly comprising of starch and carbohydrates. The consequences of such a lifestyle was observed in the second episode of Jamie’s School Dinners, whereby school children from a primary school in Durham easily identified fast food brands rather than the names of common vegetables. Therefore, implementing a diet plan onto school canteens and, considering the diversity we have in Malaysia, catering to the preferences of each ethnicity would be deemed challenging – as opposed to the standard meal size and preference in Britain, which mostly only caters to one race (if at all). So what is it that attracts children to choose one type of food over the other? We take a closer look at the amount of exposure children have these days from watching food channels (that is, if they watch food channels) on Astro, and how we might have a fighting chance at implementing a better diet if we